It’s the final frontier for the global game’s final frontier and it’s just about the only thing left standing between Major League Soccer and indisputable major league status. It’s television, where sports circuits vie for the big bucks but where the North American league, which is about to kick off its 17th season, barely registers.

Just about every MLS metric other than the Nielsen ratings has improved dramatically over the past few years. The Montreal Impact will play their inaugural game on Saturday evening, becoming the league’s 19th club. There were just 12 in 2006. The average player’s salary has soared 85 percent over the same period while average attendance rose more than 15 percent to a number that exceeds both the NBA’s and NHL’s. There are new stadiums and new cities clamoring to get involved.

But few outside those stadiums are watching. In 2011, the 20 regular season MLS telecasts on ESPN and ESPN2 averaged a paltry 291,000 viewers. That figure represented a 15 percent increase from the previous year. It also represents the number of people who are probably watching a local school board meeting. The numbers on Fox Soccer, albeit a much smaller network, are minuscule—just 70,000 viewers per game.

It’s not that Americans don’t watch soccer. They just don’t watch much MLS. The U.S. national team and World Cup get great numbers (ABC averaged a 9.9 rating as more than 19 million watched the 2010 loss to Ghana in the round of 16) and even the European pro leagues do well. For example, Fox (the flagship network) drew 2.6 million viewers to the UEFA Champions League final between Barcelona and Manchester United last May.

In November, a Sunday morning match between Liverpool and Chelsea on Fox drew a 1.1 Nielsen rating. Compare that to the MLS Cup final later that day, a contest that featured Landon Donovan, David Beckham and the L.A. Galaxy. Up against the New York Giants-Philadelphia Eagles NFL game, MLS’s showpiece event got a 0.8 for ESPN (more watched in Spanish on Galavision and in Canada).

MLS executives have said repeatedly that they want their league to be one of the world’s strongest in 10 years. Right now, if Nielsen is to be believed, it’s not even the most popular soccer league in the U.S.

“We’re going to have to have higher TV ratings. There’s no doubt about that. But the growth of our TV audience, we believe, is related to the growth of the overall popularity of the league, our players, our clubs. And that’s a process that’s going to take some time,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said during a Thursday conference call in response to a question from Sporting News.

“Growing our television ratings is a priority. It’s a function of our marketing efforts, our schedule, the right promotion platforms with the right TV partner and a product people care about. Those four things are pillars, if you will, we focus on almost every day.”

But the question remains: Why is everything about MLS growing but TV viewership? Some may claim they won’t watch because MLS isn’t as good as the Premier League and La Liga. But the football played in the Big Ten isn’t as good as that played in the NFC North, and that doesn’t steer people away from Michigan and Ohio State. Others argue that the league simply hasn’t been around long enough to make fans who love the Houston Dynamo rearrange their schedule to watch a game between the New England Revolution and New York Red Bulls like a Texans fan might tune into a Patriots-Jets tilt. But those same fans will wake up on a Saturday morning and watch teams from Manchester and London on Fox Soccer. Others blame ESPN and Fox for a lack of promotion or MLS for not marketing its game correctly.

For Arlo White, a TV commentator who covered the NFL in his native England before moving to the U.S. and covering fútbol in Seattle, it’s about creating compelling stories that viewers will want to follow.

“To a large extent in Europe, a lot of the coverage of soccer is personality driven through the newspapers, the tabloid press and that drives interest in the games,” he told Sporting News. “There’s obviously club allegiance—your grandfather supported the team and your father supported the team—and that generational aspect is very important. But there’s such a furor created during the week because of the story lines, much like the NFL in this country, that people can’t wait for the games on the weekend.”

Having a smaller country where newspapers and talk radio aren’t regionalized helps a whole lot. But so does the ability to share and promote those stories. As the new lead soccer announcer for NBC, White, who spent the past two seasons as the voice of the Seattle Sounders, hopes to help change the way MLS is broadcast and received in the U.S. NBC and the NBC Sports Network, formerly Versus, beat out Fox to join ESPN in covering MLS (in English) for the next three years. NBC has promised to give the league professional treatment and promotion, something that many within MLS felt has been lacking with ESPN.

The Worldwide Leader’s game production is very good. But when the match was over, MLS was out of sight, out of mind. While one almost always can rely on a “SportsCenter” anchor rolling his eyes or butchering a name if and when MLS was mentioned at all, NBC plans to give the league significant exposure on its nightly “NBC SportsTalk” program.

"They're taking it very seriously. I think the production values that NBC Sports have developed over the course of 70 years means everything," White said. "NBC are so estimable in this country. That’s going to be a great starting block."

In addition, an MLS ad during the Olympics or a Notre Dame football game could do wonders. Jon Miller, the president of programming for NBC Sports Group, told Sporting News recently that in the first year, the network will be shooting for a 0.3 to 0.4 rating on NBC Sports Network and a 1.0 for the three games on the over-the-air channel—a mark he said would be “fantastic.”

Miller also said that NBC “bid aggressively” for MLS. “One of the things that hasn’t been done, TV hasn’t done as good a job of building (MLS) stars. There’s stars playing every game,” he said. “We have to make sure people who are watching the games know who those people are.”

Both of the league’s U.S. English-language deals, with ESPN and NBC, expire at the end of the 2014 season. If MLS is going to grow significantly beyond where it is now and raise the quality of play to match its ambition, it’s going to have to be able to command significantly larger rights fees in three years. (Reports peg NBC’s investment at $10 million annually).

It takes time to build brand equity with fans and viewers, and MLS hasn’t had a lot of it. Nevertheless, the next three years will be critical if Garber and Co. are to realize their 10-year plan.

“Hopefully you then see a virtuous circle. The more money that comes into the league through TV rights, it can start to relax the stringent salary cap rules,” White told Sporting News.

“It’s now down to the broadcasters to take this seriously, to get it on other platforms rather than just the game broadcast, employ the right people, talk about the game in an elevated and educated way.”